Prose Painting
- Razi Haider
- Aug 4, 2016
- 2 min read
جمتے خون کے جالے مجھے (ریشم کے کیڑے کی مانند ) مجھ میں مقید کر چکے ہیں حیض ابل رہا ہے نس نس سے کچے گوشت کی بو ، کرگسوں کے جھرمٹ ،
چیختے ہوئے ایک ساحل پر لیٹی عورت (ایسے جیسے اس کی بچہ دانی ، مردہ بچوں کا گھر ) وہ آبلہ پا !! اسکی تمنائیں بے سد مردہ بچہ ، لال سمندر ... کرگس اسے نوچتے ہوئے
The cobwebs of the clotting blood,
(like silk worms) have imprisoned me in myself
I mensurate from every pore
The smell of uncooked meat,
flocks of vultures,
screaming
A woman lying on a beach
(As if her womb is home to dead children)
She has sore feet.
Her wishes won't flutter
A dead baby, a red ocean
Vultures gording upon it
Influences :
This prose poem is inspired from the works of Frida Kahlo.
It is to be understood that miscarriage is just a metaphor. There are so many perspectives one could look at. But most importantly after 9/11 how the world around me changed in Pakistan is what I thought about it when I was writing it. How like a woman not able to have children, my country suffered. The political dynamics of the area have been changing since then. The polity in Pakistan suffered so much that almost everyone around us has someone who died in some terror attack.A daunting number of 60 thousand people dead since.
Then there was 2005's earthquake( death toll 100,000 ). It shattered me from within and those images of a torn city , Muzaffarabad ( where I spent the most important years of my childhood); the bookshops that I used to go to buy story books were no more; the hospital whose roads I used to roam around on my BMX with my sister was no more. All images/memories around me morphed into something else. That dusty image of the city was there to stay.
11 years have passed but those screams still haunt me. The image of an abandoned hospital where in an open sky lie screaming bodies but no doctors or nurses to take care of them.
I am not the same man since. A torn woman lying on the beach is my city,It is my civilization that is not the same anymore.
On 9/11
on Earthquake
Have a look at the following link for some detail on Frida and her miscarriages.
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